K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

vtclock: One more console clock can’t hurt

Just a short note today, about another possible clock and/or screensaver for your terminal-only system. This is vtclock, running in screen-vs.

The home page insists the only thing needed to make this work is ncurses, and so I am fairly confident that it will build on your system. The source code dates back to 2005 and might show a warning or two when you compile it, but I had no difficulties on my Pentium. Expect it to finish in under a minute, no matter what you run.

This one doesn’t scale itself to a window size, like clockywock, and doesn’t occupy a small enough space to be “portable,” like tty-clock, and doesn’t seem to do color like binclock … but it’s very visible and has four different “fonts” outside from the one you see there. (Commodore junkie alert: No. 4 appears to be very close to the old C64 font pattern. … 😯 )

The real nifty tricks are the -p and -f flags, which allow you to add arbitrary text, either from a file or a command, to the display a line at a time. So you can tack on something like date, as you see in the photo, or even something else like a wifi status or the tail of dmesg. It’s very convenient.

But that’s all there is to say about it really — it’s simple and clean and does what it says. Add it to your array of screensaver gizmos in this fashion, and bask in the phosphorescent glow. …